Losing Egypt

In June of 1967, when I was ten years old, my family was getting ready to leave Taiwan, where we had lived since I was five, and move to Cairo. My father was there already, making the final arrangements. He worked for U.S.A.I.D., the overseas civic-action arm of the American government, and his new post would involve working with Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, which was then controlled by Egypt.

Despite the United States’ support for Israel, American relations with Egypt were cordial. In 1952, the U.S. had endorsed the military coup, launched by the nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, against Egypt’s feckless monarch, King Farouk. In 1956, when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and Great Britain, Israel, and France invaded, President Eisenhower openly opposed the invasion, ultimately forcing them to withdraw. It was a time when the U.S. was still determining its role as a new superpower in a region where the embers of the old colonial powers continued to burn.

Our house in Taipei was filled with crates, and our departure was imminent. We even had a house in Cairo to move into, a large British Victorian near the Giza pyramids. On a previous trip my father had taken photographs of the house. In one, I recall, a mustachioed, turbaned man, who was to be our chief “houseboy,” stood smiling in front. For several months I had been able to think of nothing but mummies and pyramids: I began each day by leaping out of bed and yelling “Egypt!” I had begged my father for my own Nile felucca and a camel to ride; he had countered with the promise of a pet donkey, and maybe a very small felucca, down the road. Meanwhile, he had signed me up for the Egyptian Boy Scouts, who, he promised me, regularly went camping in the desert.

As he flew back to Taiwan to retrieve us, the Six-Day War broke out, and soon afterward Gaza fell to Israel, along with the West Bank, which had been controlled by Jordan. President Nasser threw the Americans out for giving military support to Israel, and embraced the Russians as his closest allies. My father, needless to say, did not move our family into the house near the pyramids.

It was only in 1973, after Nasser died and his successor, Anwar Sadat, consolidated his power, that diplomatic relations with the U.S. were restored. By then, Sadat had ejected the Soviet advisors as unceremoniously as Nasser had tossed the Americans. I remember my father chortling with delight when he heard the news.

There were further twists in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship—and another war with Israel, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt lost again—but under Sadat, relations with the Americans deepened. In 1973, President Richard Nixon authorized the first major annual tranche of U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, two hundred and fifty million dollars. (By 2009, that figure had grown to $1.5 billion.) The two countries’ closer postwar ties also led, eventually, to the 1978 Camp David Accords between Sadat and Menachem Begin, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, and to the Egypt-Israel peace agreement a year later.

It was ultimately for that act—making peace with Israel—that Sadat was assassinated by Islamists in 1981. It had been only two years since the Iranian revolution, launched by Ayatollah Khomeini, had forced out Shah Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally. With his departure came a new confidence for Islamist movements throughout the Middle East, threatening to overturn the checkerboard of influence in the region, which had been carefully balanced between pro-Soviet Arab nationalist regimes and those, like Egypt’s, that had aligned themselves with the U.S. With Sadat’s assassination, Hosni Mubarak came to power, and, like Sadat, he quickly became our political partner in Egypt.

In the end, our serial monogamy with Egypt’s dictators, and the money we have given them—reportedly, sixty-eight billion dollars in all—bought us their loyalty, and years of borrowed time. That time appears to have run out. In the days to come, it will become clearer whether our money has also bought us the loyalties of ordinary Egyptians, or whether, once again, we will have to pack up and leave.